393.txt

This complete matlab for neural network

发信人: yaomc (白头翁&山东大汉), 信区: DataMining
标  题: AXA Financial Benefits from SAS's CRM tools.
发信站: 南京大学小百合站 (Tue Jan 15 14:18:17 2002), 站内信件

AXA Financial Benefits from SAS' CRM Tools  
 

Not too long ago, the insurance salesman came to you -- right to your 
door. He knew you and each member of your family by name, and he knew 
how to tailor financial plans for your unique needs.   
Alan Satterlee, vice president of customer segmentation, AXA Financial 
 
 

But times have changed, and so have insurance companies. When the parent
 of Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S. changed its name to AXA
 Financial, Inc., and redirected its business strategies to focus on 
financial advisory services and products, executives there wanted to 
make sure the focus remained on the customers, as product offerings 
and services expanded broadly. 

SAS has helped AXA Financial keep that personal touch, providing 
customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that help the company 
understand the needs of each of its 4 million policyholders. That's an 
ambitious goal. But by using SAS' Enterprise Miner software, the 
Customer Segmentation Analysis Group can determine which customers 
hold what products and predict customer preferences for new offerings. 


Playing a Critical Role
"Transitioning from a company with an insurance and annuity focus to AXA
 Financial with a CRM focus required significant changes in strategy and
 infrastructure," says Kent Bauer, director of data mining and 
analytics. "Developing a 360-degree view of the customer required AXA 
Financial to extract diverse customer information such as policy 
purchase history, profitability metrics, and demographic and lifestyle 
data from multiple sources and platforms. The next challenge, of course,
 was to provide an analytical environment for integrating and modeling 
the customer data." 

  

As AXA Financial moves forward in implementing its new strategy, SAS 
plays a major role in two critical areas: infrastructure and business 
intelligence. The SAS infrastructure components, SAS/ACCESS to DB2 and 
SAS/ACCESS to Oracle, allow AXA Financial to extract data from its 
data warehouse (DB2 on mainframe) and multiple data marts (Oracle on 
Unix servers) to create an integrated, customer-focused analytical 
database. The Customer Segmentation Analysis Group then leverages the 
sophisticated statistical modeling capabilities of Enterprise Miner from
 SAS to develop customer cross-sell and customer up-sell models. 

"After we evaluated the competitive marketplace," Bauer says, "we felt 
that SAS provided the most robust and seamless analytical environment 
with the added benefit of multiple integration options." 

As a result, AXA Financial business and IT professionals have reversed a
 trend. They used to spend 70 percent of their time finding and 
accessing data, and only 30 percent analyzing the resulting information.
 Today, the data access/analysis paradigm has been reversed, allowing 
more time for both business and IT groups to translate the customer data
 into sound marketing and sales strategies. 

Broadening Strategies
AXA Financial has approximately 10,000 employees and 7,500 financial 
professionals in the United States and $483 billion in client assets 
under management as of Dec. 31, 2000. It is part of the AXA Group, which
 includes operations in approximately 50 countries, approximately 140,
000 employees and $845 billion in client assets under management as of 
the same date. 

Consolidation in the insurance and financial services industries has 
created fierce competition. The cultural shift has encouraged AXA 
Financial to move from gathering isolated information regarding policies
 to measuring cross-sell rates, "share of wallet," and the rate at which
 new products are being sold to existing customers. 

"Strategically, we began to realize that we have a lot of revenue 
opportunities within our own customer base," says Alan Satterlee, AXA 
Financial's vice president of customer segmentation. "To take 
advantage of those opportunities, we needed to broaden our traditional 
segmentation work." 

AXA wanted to know which clients might want financial advice and which 
would be likely to pay for it. Company leaders also wanted to know 
what stages of life those customers were in. How many are retired? How 
many have kids? Who has disposable income? "There is opportunity there,"
 Satterlee says. "We want to know who needs the advice and who might 
be receptive." 

SAS Adds Intelligence
SAS adds value to the segmentation effort, providing the ability to 
overlay cross-selling and purchase analysis with traditional 
segmentation groups. That information is very helpful to the sales 
force. "From a marketing perspective, you can't really focus on all 4 
million policyholders in one month or a given year, so SAS is helping us
 to prioritize which of our customers are more likely to buy," Satterlee
 explains. 

AXA has invested resources in making certain that field agents 
understand how the intelligence that SAS offers can help them be more 
successful. "We're visiting our different regions saying, 'You know your
 customers very well, and we can add value showing you the analytics and
 segmentation scores that point out who to focus on,' " Satterlee says.
 

Predicting Behavior
Traditionally, insurance companies have known that there is a spike in 
surrender rates (the rates of those who give up their policies) 
associated with certain points in a policyholder's life. With the 
increased analytic capabilities of SAS, AXA can now look for certain 
drivers -- missed payments or account withdrawals, for example -- that 
might be early indications that a customer is about to cancel. "When you
 know three to six months in advance who is at risk for completely 
canceling their policy and are sharing that information with the field,
 that is where you see real impact," Satterlee says. 

AXA Financial's greatest gains have come with the company's existing 
customers. "We've done a lot of work to assist our field force in 
developing and deepening relationships within our existing customer 
base," Satterlee says. "We have a much better understanding of potential
 cross-sell opportunities and share-of-wallet estimates. Approaching 
associates and customers with this more rigorous approach, we see 
increased confidence in our management capabilities as we track the 
increase in multiple relationships, demonstrating that our cross-selling
 efforts are successful." 

 

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